Hardware

ask if there were any power surges. sounds like toast to me though.

ask if there were any power surges. sounds like toast to me though.
put in a boot disk and restart. start computer without cd rom support. type in fdisk at the a: prompt. hit enter until you come to select 1 to 4. 4 should be display partition.
if you can't get that far than it is gone. if you see no partition, it is gone. if not active than select to make it active.
sounds like toast to me though.

If the problem is tight spindle bearings you may be able to free them by removing the drive and slap it on a hard surface. you have nothing to loose at this point.

One other possible fix would be to get an exact duplicat of the drive and start swapping the board parts. Tech republic does have the 200 ways to revive a dead hard drive article. All this may be in vane. Have you tried it as a secondary in a different pc?

Another option is to connect it to another computer to secondary. The problem sector may be in MBR, and thus if you do not boot to it, you may be able to recover data from it.

Data Recovery specialists may also be able to recover data from it. I wouldn't recommend banging it around too much.